Mikayla Finley | Greystokey Productions

Hello everyone! Just in case you sometimes struggle with Minecraft, I am here to help. Here are some of my favorite tips! Version There are two main versions of Minecraft, which are Bedrock Edition and Java Edition. Java is the original version of Minecraft, and you can easily create servers, install mods and other things in this version. However Java Edition is poor in terms of multiplayer capabilities, because in Java Edition, you can only play with other Java Edition players. With Bedrock edition, you can play with friends regardless if they are playing Bedrock or Java. However, Bedrock isn’t very good in terms of mods. I myself play Bedrock Edition, because I am not really into Minecraft for the mods. Mods can be interesting, however they are just not my cup of tea. Bedrock Edition does have add ons, but they cost minecoins, a virtual currency within the in-game Minecraft store known as the Minecraft Marketplace. Java Edition has a couple of extra game modes that Bedrock Edition does not. These modes are called Hardcore mode, and Spectator mode. Hardcore is a mode where if you die, the world is deleted, and Spectator allows you to fly around a world without getting hurt. Java also has snapshots, which allow players to see content that is being worked on before it is officially released into an update. Bugs and glitches can occur with work in progress content within the snapshots. Spawn When you spawn into a new survival world, the issue of hunger will come about. I suggest searching for growable food items nearby if you don’t want to kill animals. If you are feeling like going on a trek, you can search for a village. Villages can be tricky to find sometimes. Villages always have some sort of food items ready for you to grab. The villagers don’t mind if you take some. If you find bales of hay in the village you can use a hoe to break the hay bales quickly so you can craft them into bread to eat. To quickly get some iron while at the village, kill the iron golem or golems in the village. If you hit a golem once, then build four blocks upwards, you can hit the golem without it hitting you back. Iron golems drop iron upon death. You can also look through the chests in the village while you are there, to see what else you can grab that might be useful. The chests can have food, weapons, armor, tools, and ores, among other things. When you first spawn in, if there are trees nearby, break the logs and make some wood and craft a crafting table, then some basic tools. Here’s a handy method for when you collect some wood. Try to leave the very bottom log of the tree intact so you can stand on it while collecting the rest, and if there are some logs higher up, jump and place dirt or really any block that’s easy to break beneath your feet until you can reach those pesky higher up logs. Once you obtain them, break the blocks you placed and get that final log at the bottom. Once you have your basic tools, you need to dig to get to stone and then make stone tools. You can keep the wooden tools just in case your stone tools break and you do not have your crafting table, or to use later on in a furnace to smelt things. If you have any extra logs when you don’t need them, you can smelt them for charcoal, which can be used to make torches in a similar manner to coal. If you have three wool and three wooden planks of any kind, you can craft a bed. Beds are useful for setting your spawn, plus skipping night and not having to deal with dangerous mobs like zombies, skeletons, creepers and more. You can use dye to color a bed by putting the bed in a crafting table with a single dye of your choice. However, you should be careful if you are moving a bed. Place a temporary second bed, and set your spawn to it, before you move your original bed, if you are planning on moving it a distance away from its original spot. If you find a structure with loot, place a bed outside it and set it as your spawn so if you die in the structure, you can easily get your items back without them despawning. Items In Minecraft items have durability. Each tool/weapon and armor item has a durability bar from the moment it is crafted. However, until the item takes damage for the first time, the durability bar is not visible. The durability bar changes color based off of how much durability is left. Green is a safe amount of durability, yellow is okay, orange is a little worrying, and red means you need to repair the item before it breaks. If it does break, craft a new item. I usually craft more than one tool such as a pickaxe for example, so if my tool breaks while I am mining, I have a spare one. Items such as carrots on a stick, fishing rods, warped fungus on a stick, flint and steel, and elytras have durability bars as well. Mining If your Y coordinate says 11, it will be the easiest to find diamonds. However, getting down to Y=11 can be tricky since you have to dig quite a bit down. In order to mine diamonds, you at least need an iron pickaxe. If you try to use a wooden or stone pickaxe you will break the ore blocks and won’t get the diamonds. Another tip for mining is to place a trapdoor on a wall and close it. You will start crawling. This can be useful for mining straight forward, which can lead to quick diamond finds. Y=5 to Y=11 are the best diamond finding areas, and you should mine in-between those coordinate areas for your best bet at finding diamonds. When you get to an area with a lot of bedrock, that is usually about Y=3. Go two blocks higher, then you’ll most likely be at Y=5. When mining, do not dig straight up or down because you could fall into a cavern, or water could flood where you have dug. I suggest standing in-between two blocks or standing on one of two, and mine both sides one block at a time. Remain careful of anything dangerous that might come about. You can even do a four block method if you really want. If you find some diamonds, be careful, as lava could be nearby. Speaking of lava, buckets of lava are great fuel for furnaces, and you get your bucket back when using a lava bucket as fuel. Cool huh? Survival When making a nether portal you only need 10 obsidian. You can use other blocks to fill in the corners of the portal if you’d like. Another way to make a portal without having a diamond pickaxe is to use water and lava. You can do this by making a frame of where the obsidian will go with another block type. Place the water at the top of the frame. Once the water flows down the frame, you can add lava onto bits of the frame. When water and lava mix, obsidian is created. Afterwards, get rid of the water and non-obsidian portal frame, and light the nether portal with a flint and steel. You do not need to get rid of the non-obsidian part of the frame if you like it, it can be a portal decoration. If you have not slept for a few in game days, a mob called the phantom can spawn. They will swoop down from the sky and try to bite you. Phantoms spawn only at night, so be sure to rest well and often so phantoms don’t spawn. When phantoms die, they have a chance to drop phantom membranes, which can be used to repair elytras if they are damaged. A stonecutter is a block that’s a more efficient way to make things such as stairs, walls, and slabs of varied types of stone and blocks. It’s more efficient than crafting those individual items. A grindstone allows you to disenchant things and repair them at the same time. However grindstone cannot remove curse enchantments such as curse of binding. The smoker is an item that can cook meat twice as fast as a furnace. A blast furnace acts similar to a smoker, however the blast furnace is for ores instead of food. The ores are smelted twice as fast in comparison to a normal furnace. A blast furnace can also be a cool looking and useful decoration for buildings. When mining or doing things in the dark, place torches or another light source where you go so mobs don’t try to spawn behind you and hurt you. Use minecarts and rail systems to make easy travel methods or fun roller coaster tracks. If you don’t want your wood structure burning, you could use nether wood or wood slabs. Oddly enough wooden slabs do not burn. Placing a torch underneath gravel or sand will break all the gravel or sand blocks. In certain difficulties zombies can break doors. However there are solutions to this. You could either place the door one block higher so the zombies cannot reach it, or use fence gates which zombies cannot break. You can fight back easily by hitting the zombies through the fence gates. Wearing a carved pumpkin can prevent endermen from attacking you, even if you attack them. However, in first person the pumpkin obstructs your vision. Pet cats will help keep pesky creepers away since creepers are afraid of cats. You tame a wild cat by feeding it raw cod or raw fish. However the wild cats may try to run from you, so I suggest sneaking up on them to feed them. If a pet cat is not sitting when you go to sleep in game, they have a chance to bring a gift to you, similar to how a cat would bring gifts to its owner in real life. You can dye cat and dog collars to tell your many in-game pets apart if you do not have name tags handy. Speaking of dogs, they have a health meter. Kind of. The higher a dog’s tail, the more health they have, and the lower the tail, the smaller amount of health they have. Magma blocks and soul sand can be used to make water elevators. When soul sand is underwater it creates an upwards current and magma blocks create a downwards current. You can actually sleep to make rain go away. You can fly in survival mode using an elytra you obtain from end cities, and fireworks which are craftable, After defeating the ender dragon, you can explore the end and find small gateways which can teleport you to areas with end cities. End cities can have loot and other things. However, shulkers spawn in them. End cities have a 50% chance to spawn along with an end ship, which has a 100% chance of containing, you guessed it, an elytra. Be careful and do not panic if you are hit by a shulker’s bullets. Shulker bullets can make you float in the air for a bit. However, you can use this to your advantage and get to places you’d have difficulty getting to otherwise. Be careful since a wrongly timed fall can kill you. You can travel very fast by riding a boat on blue ice. It may look silly but you can outrun the game’s render distance sometimes. However, don’t leave your boats behind or mobs might try to get inside them. If you go to a dangerous place, bring an ender chest with you. If you know you are going to die, put your stuff in an ender chest. If you have a separate ender chest in your base where you respawn, you can get your stuff back, considering the ender chests are in a way connected. The Nether Trekking in the nether can be tricky, so before you go through your nether portal be sure to have on armor, and have some cobblestone on you. The cobblestone will be useful if ghasts attack you, since ghasts cannot blow up cobblestone with their fireballs. Cobblestone may not be the prettiest block out there, but it’s the best if you don’t want ghasts blowing up your nether buildings or nether base. Be sure to bring a flint and steel with you too just in case a ghast de-lights your nether portal. If your flint and steel breaks you can craft fire charges using gunpowder, blaze powder, and coal. This will allow you to re-light your portal so you can get back to the overworld once more. In the nether you can get gunpowder from killing ghasts, blaze powder from blazes, and coal from wither skeletons. In the nether lava has physics much like water in the overworld. Meaning lava flows faster and further in the nether than it does in the overworld. Oddly enough, snow, ice, packed ice and blue ice can be in the nether, however water cannot. Weird huh? Don’t try to sleep in the nether using a bed. If you attempt to do so, the bed explodes. However, if you want to respawn in the nether, use a respawn anchor. Other Don’t go past one million blocks in the game. If you go past that extreme point your camera view may get jittery and you may even fall through blocks sometimes. Going 65 thousands blocks gives a similar effect, just not as bad. Either way, I’d suggest you not do them unless absolutely necessary. I hope you enjoy these Minecraft tips and I’ll ‘see’ you in our virtual art world again soon!